<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; ">Forgot to forward this to the lists...<BR><DIV><BR><DIV>Begin forwarded message:</DIV><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000"><B><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></B></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" color="#000000" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; color: #000000"><B>Subject: </B></FONT><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica"><B>Palm, Access, Linux and Irrelevance</B></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV> <DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Hey Brad...</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">A friend forwarded me your "Opening up the Wireless Handset" article, and I figured I have a few apropos comments.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">First... I've been "in the mobile value chain" for almost a decade, working first for RSA and Certicom and later at Handspring, PalmSource and consulting for "the usual suspects." I've been using Unix since the early 80's and Linux since rev 0.91 of the kernel (not that there's much knowledge from the 0.91 days that's useful today.) I'm the Co-Founder of the Homebrew Mobile Phone Club [1] and a participant on various OpenMoko [2] related projects. I am also, as far as I know, the first person to recommend the concept of the "complete open phone," [3] the idea that the market is best served by a collection of open hardware specifications, open source software and the ability to buy single-unit quantities of everything you should need to build your own phone. (Though good ideas seem to spring out of the woodwork, so I wouldn't be surprised if someone else came up with the idea, too.)</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">I guess what I wanted to say is... opening up the handset is about more than deploying open source code (or even publishing hardware reference designs.) It's about changing the way manufacturers, marketers and solution providers interact with their customers. The joy of the Treo (and earlier platforms from Microsoft and Psion) was that individual users could make the decision what application code they added to their devices. If you weren't happy with the limited calendar that came with your Treo, you could buy or download a replacement. If you worked in a vertical market, you could add industry or corporation specific applications to your mobile device that would (in theory) increase your personal productivity. Or maybe it would allow you to implement a better business process. The Springboard platform on the Visor extended this concept to custom hardware; it's passing is partially what led me to experiment with making my own "homebrew" mobile phone.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">The great joy of mobile Linux is not, as it's used by Access, Palm and Motorola, as a "cheap" alternative for some other operating environment. Anyone who's worked with mobile Linux knows that free can often be quite costly. It's great benefit is that it's a non-denominational "meeting place" for ideas about software. Like other Unices, Linux implements Posix and exports useful abstractions for programmers and administrators. Got an idea for a better calendar app? Just write it. Worried about security on your wireless network? Maybe that security agent software made for the desktop could work on your mobile device? Now that we're starting to see more mobile devices with USB host and Bluetooth, devices made from these standards are easy to integrate into a mobile Linux solution.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">The great joy of Linux on mobile devices is not that it reduces cost, but that it reduces risk.<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN>There are countless ways the development of a mobile solution can be brought to a screeching halt. Experience has shown that we frequently don't know what the major development problems are when we begin a product design. But for my money, the wealth of tools available for Linux means with a little creativity, you can hack your way to a solution easier than had you started with WinCE or Symbian (or even PalmOS to a lesser degree.)</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">And the great thing about it is it's not owned by any one vendor. To be sure there are many reasons why you might want to develop with WinCE and Symbian (and PalmOS and iTRON and ... ) But the future of Linux is not married to any one particular company. While I love Platform Builder and Vis Dev Studio, I have noticed that WinMobile 5.0 makes it easy to integrate with Microsoft-based services (Windows Media, NTLM, etc.), but a pain in the keester if you're trying to develop a system that uses open standards like FLAC, Vorbis, Speex, etc. There's a perception that you don't have these problems in Linux, and for the most part it's true.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">From my experience, though, neither Palm or Access (or Motorola or Nokia) understand this. Well... okay... Nokia and Motorola are starting to show signs of catching on. But Palm and Access seem to be taking a closed approach to Linux. Palm has noted that it's not going to be licensing (or presumably releasing) it's distro. They're using Linux to provide a stable underpinning for their Garnet emulator (or so it seems to me.) Access is trying to make money selling middleware and applications for Linux. Well... more power to 'em. With Access' Hiker Project and Nokia's Maemo/Hildon, both are asking application developers to increase the risk of their projects by requesting they expend effort to customize their apps for their own commercial products.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">And then they wonder why people are spending a lot of effort to deploy web-based apps that could, in theory, run on any device, even a mobile browser. Hiker may die. Hildon may die. And it's my sad experience to report that even the WinCE APIs vary over time. But javascript, God help us, goes on. If you look at Access' price sheet, this sorta explains why they're giving their middleware away but selling their browser.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">But... If I'm an app developer, why should I customize my app to use a device-specific UI API, when I could extend my app's life and applicability by using the browser (any browser) as a renderer. And I think this is the question that both Palm and Access have missed. TrollTech's QT is quite refined, especially when compared to either Hiker or Hildon. And their dual-licensing model benefits experimenters.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">I keep thinking that TrollTech, Palm, Access (and to a lesser degree, Microsoft) have missed an opportunity to move "up the value chain." IBM did this in the 90's... it was painful, but ultimately profitable. By shedding their low-margin businesses and concentrating on providing business re-engineering consulting, IBM was able to focus on high-value, high-margin activities for their customers. IBM still sells hardware, to be sure, but it's all stuff they can't buy cheaper from other people or it's high-performance equipment (SP2s, zSeries, etc.) thats meets specific customer requirements (online transaction processing, etc.)</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">TrollTech and Access view themselves as software companies, and that's the problem. Both organizations must overcome an increasingly skeptical, cost-sensitive market. The cost of mass-market devices is plummeting, and both companies need to hitch their wagon to a couple more hit products if they are to survive. Palm, Motorola and Nokia view themselves as hardware companies, and despite several commercial and critical successes are struggling to survive in a market with increasing pressure to reduce cost.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">In his presentation "Models of Software Acceptance : How Winners Win," [4] Dick Gabriel discusses the utility of evolution in software development. Or more specifically, he points out that evolutionary theory credits the changing environment, and not the mutating individual as the primary agent of natural selection. We sometimes forget this. In the tech marketplace, products that can be adapted to new, specific requirements are the ones that survive. Companies that make these products survive to compete another day. To the degree that we can predict the future needs of our customers, we can build products that meet these needs. But internal conflict occurs when we predict the utility of a product that competes with our current cash cows. Gabriel points out the biological equivalent of this effect; "only things that are relatively worthless change rapidly and dramatically." Molecular biology, it appears, prevents mutation in genes that encode survival traits.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Gabriel uses Geoffrey Moore's "Crossing the Chasm" [5] model overlaid on evolutionary biology to analyze how innovation is related to market acceptance. Within his evolutionary model, Gabriel advises tech companies to develop inexpensive technology that adequately meets an emerging market need. If we read Anderson's "Long Tail," [6] we're likely to assume this means we should go after niche markets.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">In "Sources of Innovation" and "Democratizing Innovation," [7] MIT professor Eric von Hippel argues a similar point, but from the perspective of the niche customer. In von Hippel's model, "lead users" are individuals who are highly motivated to solve a business problem, are not being serviced by existing suppliers and have the ability to fabricate ad-hoc solutions. Companies who understand the needs of lead users may make decisions informed by experiences of real customers. Properly executed, companies use lead user studies to discover what customers value and how their existing products or services can be modified to efficiently meet the emerging markets lead users represent.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">If we again apply Anderson's philosophy on the value of niche markets, and everything we learned from Taiichi Ohno [8], the future may be large "Just in Time" manufacturing centers capable of selling 98% complete products into a constellation of marketing companies, each specializing in understanding the values and needs of different niches.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Palm and Access are firmly focused on the international wireless carrier market. And from their perspective, I wouldn't expect anything else. It's a proven money-maker and a growth industry. But they've both shown a bit of myopia when it comes to looking at the "bigger picture." Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! have failed in voice chat applications, and Vonage is certainly skirting the rocky shoals of corporate insolvency. But Skype seems to be taking hold. Backed up by eBay's financial resources and joined at the hip with PayPal, they are starting to be a serious competitor. But Palm and Access are too dependent on the carrier's good graces to be able to work with Skype or any of the VoIP players. In short, they're trying as hard as they can to design products that make it easy to browse the web over WiFi, but difficult to integrate SIP/RTP VoIP solutions.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">In the meantime, organizations like the Homebrew Mobile Phone Club and the OpenMoko community are developing user interfaces, applications, hardware designs and open source software to provide "lead user" innovators with the tools they need to solve real world business problems in a cost effective manner. Palm, Nokia and Motorola appear to be competing to make the next Linux-based Blackberry killer. Access is expanding the reach of its browser by surrounding it with Linux middleware. Palm's competitive edge against Nokia is it's installed base of PalmOS apps, and it's user community. But the PalmOS heyday is long past, ask any PalmOS developer. Nokia's been known to make mistakes, but should they decide to move Linux into their mainstream products, they'll do so as a market leader. By making the browser the center-piece of their profitability smorgasbord, Access runs the risk of irrelevance should a mobile version of Firefox ever deploy (or should Mark Shuttleworth decide that he wants to make "Mobuntu".)</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">I wish Palm and Access luck, but I can't help but think they're jockeying for position on the hierarchy of irrelevance.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">-Cheers,</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">-Matt H.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">References:</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">1. <A href="http://hbmobile.org">http://hbmobile.org</A>/</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">2. <A href="http://openmoko.org">http://openmoko.org</A>/</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">3. <A href="http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/etel/2006/09/05/the-complete-open-phone.html">http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/etel/2006/09/05/the-complete-open-phone.html</A></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">4. <A href="http://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/AcceptanceModels.pdf">http://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/AcceptanceModels.pdf</A></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">5. <A href="http://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Chasm-Marketing-High-Tech-Mainstream/dp/0066620023">http://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Chasm-Marketing-High-Tech-Mainstream/dp/0066620023</A></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">6. <A href="http://www.longtail.com">http://www.longtail.com</A>/</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">7. <A href="http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/books.htm">http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/books.htm</A></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">8. <A href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban</A></DIV> </BLOCKQUOTE></DIV><BR></BODY></HTML>